Video Game Design Between 1990-2008

Remembering the good all days, when me and my friends were playing Doom, Mortal Kombat, Quake or War Craft on a Pentium 133 MHz computer with Sound Blaster and a 4MB video card. A lot has changed since then.

Video games actually are a lot older than that we used to play in the 90s. The first video game was created in 1947 called Tennis for two and it was played on an oscilloscope like device.

With the release of Apple II, Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum in late 70s early 80s people could afford to buy such devices and to play video games from their own home. By the mid 80s the video game industry started to evolve at a fast pace releasing games such as Zork, Battlezone and Bard’s Tale.

From design and graphics point of view, video games greatly evolved and continue to do so. Writing about 90s computer games in 2008 is somewhat nostalgic and in the same time it’s funny, because what can you expect from a 16 bit graphic display and a 100 MHz machine, but remembering that in those days these configs were king just as 3,6 GHz and Nvidia GeForce 9400 nowdays.

So, let’s look at how the graphics and design evolved starting from 1990.